All Rise...

The Charge

Some men dream of conquering the world. Roger Corman created his own.

The Case

As a longtime fan of Roger Corman and the hundreds of movies he's made
ranging from terrible to genuinely brilliant, I'm already in the bag for a
documentary like Corman's World. Alex Stapleton's 2011 film examines the
independent producer's rise from a low-level script reader to the director and
producer of the single largest catalogue of drive-in and exploitation movies in
existence. If the movie lacks a cohesive thesis—and it does—that's
ok, because it still makes for a fast-paced and totally entertaining look back
at the godfather of the B-movie.

It's a testament to just how many huge careers Corman helped launch that so
many titans of the movie industry would submit to an interview for Corman's
World, which includes reminiscences from the likes of Jack Nicholson, Robert
De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Joe Dante, Allen Arkush,
William Shatner, Pam Grier, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Polly Platt, Bruce
Dern and more. It does become slightly repetitive after awhile, because the
movie is populated by the same faces throughout; I wish the filmmakers had sat
down with some of the directors, writers and actors who maybe hadn't gone on to
mainstream success, either because they were never able to or just had no
interest in it. Still, it's hard to argue not just with the credentials of a guy
like Scorsese when he's praising Corman, but also how articulate he is in
describing Corman's brand of genius. If you want someone to go to bat for you as
a filmmaker, you could do worse.

As a documentary, Corman's World has a lot in common with other
recent exploitation retrospective docs like Not Quite Hollywood or Machete
Maidens Unleashed, combining talking heads with a succession of choice clips
designed to make viewers want to go out and track down every movie featured
within it. There's some attempt to include something of a narrative through-line
in the movie, with interviewees and participants lamenting for three-fourths of
the film that Corman doesn't get the respect he deserves so that the movie can
climax with the legendary producer receiving an Honorary Lifetime Achievement
Oscar in 2010. It works just fine, but it doesn't carry much weight because a)
it's hardly evidence that Corman has finally been accepted by the mainstream
Hollywood establishment, because the people presenting him the award and
speaking on his behalf are all former employees who we know have already
"accepted" him and b) Corman himself, though occasionally expressing
displeasure at the way his contributions have been marginalized (he admits to
sometimes resenting titles like "king of schlock"), hardly seems
interested in that kind of success. For us fans of AIP and New World, it's nice
to see him getting recognized, but it's not why he'll be remembered. The movies
speak for themselves.

Anchor Bay's Blu-ray of Corman's World looks great, offering a clean
and handsome 1080p HD transfer of the movie. There's a reasonable amount of
detail in the interview segments that make up the majority of the movie, but
those aren't really shot to show off much fine detail; what's better is that so
many clips of Corman's old movies have been given and HD polish, including many
films which have never had the Blu-ray treatment (it may be just a couple of
brief shots, but it's fun to see what Monster from the Ocean Floor looks
like in the best possible format). The film is offered with a lossless TrueHD
surround audio track, and it's more than satisfactory for this kind of
"talking head" documentary. The bonus features are disappointingly
slim, made up only of a couple of extended interviews and "messages to
Roger" from several of the doc's participants and the movie's original
trailer. What a missed opportunity to offer, at the very least, a trailer
gallery for a bunch of Corman's stuff. If the documentary didn't already
convince the uninitiated to seek out a bunch of his old movies, the trailers
would have put it over the top.

I'm not sure anyone will come away from Corman's World with a
significantly deeper of Corman as a man or as an artist—most of the
stories are of the same "Roger is very frugal" and "Roger knows
what he's doing" variety. Perhaps that's for the best, though, as the man's
career is too expansive to really be covered in detail in the confines of a
90-minute documentary. Instead, it's just a joy to hang out in the company of
Corman, the filmmakers he launched and his ridiculous body of work—a
legacy the likes of which we will never see again. Corman made a lot of movies,
and while they weren't always good, they were always fun. Corman's World
gets that.